


Break The Yoke

by hyakinthos



Category: Death Note
Genre: Gen, a view of events which occurred in canon, mentions of soichirou yagami, spoilers all the way to the end, warning for guns
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-07
Updated: 2015-02-07
Packaged: 2018-03-10 23:40:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3307475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hyakinthos/pseuds/hyakinthos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"He was not an idiot, not quite so far as a mass murderer was concerned. He couldn't take that, wouldn't take that, not from someone who thought he had the ability or the right to decide who could and could not live in a tainted totalitarian fantasyland."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Break The Yoke

In the time it took to write three English letters on a slip of paper, Matsuda had drawn his gun. With the fourth, he pulled the trigger. It was the barest of actions, ripped from the most programmed recesses of his brain. He'd been trained to do things like this without thinking.

The bullet had ripped through Light's hand before Matsuda had a chance to feel one way or another about it. By the time he'd recovered from the kick of the gun, he had managed to grit his teeth.  

And after the initial shock of being shot had faded, Light still had the gall to call him an idiot. 

Matsuda had spent seven years in close company with the word, almost always ready and willing to brush it off of his shoulder. Taking shit was part of his job, up until that moment.

He was not an idiot, not quite so far as a mass murderer was concerned. He couldn't take that, wouldn't take that, not from someone who thought he had the ability or the right to decide who could and could not live in a tainted totalitarian fantasyland. 

Light had passed judgement on more human lives than Matsuda could ever hope to count, and every last one of them, fatal or not, had been childish and disgusting and wrong. If he couldn't make him take them back, Matsuda would at least cast off his own. He'd rip himself free from that yoke and splinter it over his knee.

Matsuda didn't register the words he had been shouting, didn't consider how he looked in the moment, didn't really think about much other than what Light was saying, and what he heard was worse than a personal insult.

If Matsuda was a good man who shouldn't be insulted, then Soichirou was a good man five, no, ten times over. The half-baked idea of what to do next in Matsuda's head shifted with every word out of Light's (Kira's) mouth, and when he raised his hand in one last bloodstained bid for supremacy, that sealed it.

Because if Matsuda was an idiot, and if all those people had died for nothing, if _Soichirou_ had died for nothing, then he was sorry to say that his old friend Light was derisive, deceitful, dastardly, and dead. 

Matsuda felt tears slipping down his face as he raised the gun again, screaming words he could hardly hear himself. 

This time, he wasn't shooting out of something like duty. Although the impulse to shoot when in danger had been ground into him like crumbs into carpet, it was the furthest thing from his mind at that instant. 

His train of thought was nothing but an overload of catharsis. This was for every day of the last seven years, this was for L, this was for every last anchor who'd ever had to choke out bloody numbers on the eleven o'clock news, for everyone who'd scrambled and hid and everyone who'd come into the shadows that spread behind Kira as he burned his path through the world. This was an act of reparation after the war waged by the strongest army humanity had ever seen, the one headed up by a sheltered kid with delusions of grandeur.

And above all of that, it was payback for every second he had spent laboring under the pathetic delusion that Light Yagami was anything other than a brilliant detective and a personal friend.

He almost enjoyed pushing Kira right off of his high horse, but the idea that this was what it felt like to be the hand of 'Justice' sobered him, sickened him, kneed him in the gut.

Matsuda had never believed in the death penalty, and as he lunged forward to give Light a good look down the barrel of his gun, he wrenched his shoulder to the side.

The sixth shot hit concrete, and the tempest broke. Matsuda backed off, fell to the floor, took a tremulous breath. The adrenalin left him dizzy and the tears left him with aching red eyes.

Minutes later, Light Yagami left him as well, leaving him a balled-up schematic for a new world order, a family to call, a motherfucker of a mess to clean up.

It was over.

**Author's Note:**

> I love Matsuda so much, I really wanted to take a closer look at this scene. I hope you enjoyed!


End file.
